Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium! Did you rip that off?

Dr. Emmett Brown: Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.

EvilEgg:Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Someone sold the US phony bomb detectors. They didn't go to jail for it, but profited handsomely. Fark: the TSA quit using some of them, and purchased a new generation of bomb detectors that also don't work

WhoopAssWayne:EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

On the other side of that coin, there's a guy in the area who everyone relies on to drill their wells. It's nothing so woo as dowsing, but he has a talent for going into areas where existing surveys tell you very little about where water might be, and despite that guessing where to drill and to what depth with a positive result about 80% of the time. I wouldn't call it dowsing so much as a good instinct, but can anybody explain what subtle cues his instinct relies on that the rest of us are missing? Nope.

WhoopAssWayne:EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

Veritas333:WhoopAssWayne: EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

Veritas333:WhoopAssWayne: EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

or, ya know, you could just follow the spraypainted line the locator put on the ground, thats a good way to locate pipes too.

JesseL:Veritas333: WhoopAssWayne: EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

And homeopathy really works too.

Also if you spray oven cleaner on your license plate red light cameras can't take a clean picture of it, and if you're in a courtroom displaying a flag with gold fringe on it you're actually in a maritime court and they can't try you since you aren't a ship.

Marty McFly: Doc, you don't just walk into a store and-and buy plutonium! Did you rip that off?

Dr. Emmett Brown: Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and, in turn, gave them a shoddy bomb casing full of used pinball machine parts. Come on! Let's get you a radiation suit. We must prepare to reload.

FTA: "My cousin is a policeman and he says they know these things do not work, but they have no orders to stop using them and they have been given nothing else."

Wait, so... they know they don't work, but have not received orders to not use them... so haven't they bothered to put in place any other preventive measures in the meantime?

The article doesn't say if they've put anything else in place to actually try to prevent bombs from getting through or not, but considering: "Around 20 dogs were bought to guard the capital's Green Zone, but the country's parliamentary security committee discovered they had not actually been trained to detect explosives" my hopes are not high that they've thought this far forward yet.

James McCormick, a former policeman, was convicted at the Old Bailey in April. His trial heard that the devices he was selling, called ADE-651, were based on novelty golf-ball finders and had no scientific means of detecting explosives.

I move that charges be dismissed, on grounds that the infraction was hilarious.

This is so awesome, that anyone would buy all of those with no vetting. I thought those dumbass guys in florida who were selling old communist ammo to the US gov to be used in Afghanistan was brilliant as far as evil crimes go. but this takes the cake.

Seraphym:FTA: "My cousin is a policeman and he says they know these things do not work, but they have no orders to stop using them and they have been given nothing else."

Wait, so... they know they don't work, but have not received orders to not use them... so haven't they bothered to put in place any other preventive measures in the meantime?

The article doesn't say if they've put anything else in place to actually try to prevent bombs from getting through or not, but considering: "Around 20 dogs were bought to guard the capital's Green Zone, but the country's parliamentary security committee discovered they had not actually been trained to detect explosives" my hopes are not high that they've thought this far forward yet.

Sounds almost like they've got a cargo cult going on for their security.

WhoopAssWayne:EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

That exact same thing happened to me. My guy also told me he found the water line into the house. He was in the right general area for the septic (which given the layout of the property is pretty easy to guess) but the wrong side of the house for the water line. Later, when they were doing some road work further down our street, I saw him using a dowsing rod to mark where the sewer lines were. The fact that they're right in the middle of the road and there is a manhole cover marked "sewer" about every 40 feet probably wasn't much of a clue.

Veritas333:WhoopAssWayne: EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

Dowsing is just your subconscious responding to your own expectations based on environmental cues.

I was once taken on a tour of Stonehenge by an "archeologist" who subscribed to ley lines. My group was a pretty skeptical one, but when primed by this lady about where the ley lines in the area were and how dowsing really worked to find them, most of us had dowsing rods move in our hands at the right places.

And yet, every experiment that has tested dowsers under controlled conditions, where there were no cues to work with, have found them to perform no better than chance. It's a trick of our subconscious telling us something it already knows, whether from priming about ley lines or experience with common ways of laying water pipes.

blacknite:Veritas333: WhoopAssWayne: EvilEgg: Dowsing for bombs? They really should try crystal power, because while dowsing is obviously fake, no one can deny the power in crystals.

Dowsing is actually real. The trick is that the power has to be given to you by someone with the ability. After they hand it down, they lose the power. All of this was told to me by the guy who, outside my house, pulled out his dowsing rods, they spun around in his hands a bit, and then he accurately found my sewage line. His said the fact I showed him where it came out of the house and where the septic tank was had no effect whatsoever.

Dowsing for pipes totally works. Take one of those little flags that the locator guys put in the ground and pull off the flag. This should leave you with a foot long wire. Make sure its bare metal, no plastic coating or anything. Bend a 90 degree angle about three inches into it. Hold it in your hand so the long part is horizontal. Grip it very lightly. Slowly walk forward with it pointing straight ahead, and whenever you walk over an old linear excavation the wire will rotate 90 degrees. Works best if you use one in each hand, and if you are walking perpendicular to the pipe. Construction workers use it all the time. Basically you can use this to find old trenches for pipes, etc.

or, ya know, you could just follow the spraypainted line the locator put on the ground, thats a good way to locate pipes too.